Re: Which shell to use

Some might prefer a monospaced font like the beautiful "Liberation
Mono" (GNU General Public License) for instance. Using a non
monospace font can be irritating sometimes concerning the
indentation.

I should check that out. Fonts that include big swatches of Unicode (such as Kanji) should be fun as well.

Note that Akbar and other non-monospace aren't that bad for left-aligned languages such as Python, FORTRAN etc., as the space characters share the same width, so the block indentations appear as rigidly vertical as New Courier's.

Anyway IDLE is a very good choice for beginners, because it's small
(and thus not distracting) but has everything you need during the
first year of learning how to program. (In my experience it's
disadvantageous to use an editor or an IDE that demands a
substantial part of the learning energy and efforts of the
students.)

It's also open source in Tkinter so you can scroll through quickly and get an idea of what GUI-based Python is all about. It's pretty easy to get productive in a hurry with Tk bindings -- which is the chief weakness of IDLE: it makes for a crazy-bad Tk development environment, which is what one might be inspired to do, having used IDLE. That's when one starts learning how to boot Python from a command line.

If you're not used to a command line, because you're an eye candy junky, on either MacOS or Windows, then here's a golden opportunity to learn on. Then, after learning to go chdir, mkdir, rmdir and whatever, jump into Python's os and shutils and accomplish the same things -- good reinforcement.

Learning to love a command line is a core goal of "beginner mind" trainings.